Art Jewelry Elements: pink

Friday, July 19, 2013

Jewelry Inspiration In Bloom

Last Sunday was our 40th anniversary, so my husband and I decided to take a little road trip down the Oregon coast to celebrate. A vendor, at a recent show, told me about a state park, in Newport, Oregon, called Shore Acres. He said it had gorgeous gardens that were well worth seeing. So we made Shore Acres our end-point destination.

Shore Acres - Newport, Oregon

The entire trip was so much fun. The gardens were amazing and I love the beach, the sand between my toes and the sound of waves crashing. But today I just want to share some flowers at Shore Acres that inspired some new jewelry.

I noticed a number of flowers with pink and yellow petals. They were so striking and beautiful. The pink and yellow dahlias, pictured below, especially captured my attention.

I couldn't get these flowers out of my mind, so I decided to challenge myself to create a piece of jewelry in pink and yellow. This was a big challenge for me, because I rarely use pink and I almost never use yellow in my designs. Now I was challenging myself to use both colors in one piece!

Trying to work outside my comfortable color zone, must have tapped into a different area of my brain, because the necklace that emerged is quite unlike most of my recent work.

I don't even have many yellow beads, but fortunately I'd recently acquired a yellow ceramic pendant from Joan Tucker of Off Center Productions. I managed to find one strand of yellow pearls in my stash and some golden-yellow glass tubes.

I found some yellow and pink glass cubes in my somewhat larger collection of pink beads. I added gold colored metal accents and this is what I came up with. It looks very summery, but I'm a little surprised at how unlike me it is. LOL! I honestly can't decide if I like it or not. What do you think? Be honest!

In any case, it was fun to push myself to experiment with some different colors. I feel that pushing myself to experiment builds creativity in the same way that exercise builds muscle. I can feel my "creativity muscle" growing!